Wayne Thiebaud’s sun-suffused Beach Dogs was inspired by nostalgic recollections of his teenage years living and working in Long Beach, California, as well as his 2002 purchase of a condominium overlooking Laguna Beach, some thirty-five miles south of Long Beach (Nash and Cooper 2009, 29–30).

Several of the six cavorting canines depicted in this painting represent specific family pets from throughout Thiebaud’s long life, here resurrected in what might be viewed as a dog’s idea of heaven. The artist’s related paintings of human beings recreating at the beach suggest that the artist perceived a kinship between human animals and canine animals.

Thiebaud’s late beach paintings, completed when he was in his eighties and nineties, are imbued with an increasing awareness of his own mortality. Tide Lines (2004–2006; private collection) depicts human beings at various stages of life spanning childhood to maturity to cane-assisted old age (Nash and Cooper 2009, 39). Similar symbolic figures appear in Caspar David Friedrich’s own late coastal scene The Stages of Life (1835; Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany), which explicitly acknowledges the eternal cycles of tide and time, life and death, mortality and immortality.

The seated dog at the lower right who passively observes his companions in Beach Dogs is pointedly and poignantly contrasted with the central leashed dog, who has broken free from human constraint—and from gravity—and leaps upward to catch the airborne ball. Representing “Ring,” a Thiebaud family dog in the 1930s, this acrobatic protagonist seems to epitomize the artist’s ideal of absolute freedom: “I want to be able to paint any damn thing I want at any time, in any way that I want to do it” (Bult 2023; Whiting 2018, E2).